Health

Your Body is a Machine

Written by Trick on May 13, 2008 1:15 pm EST

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If you search the Internet, there are millions and millions of pages about weight loss. I suspect that only pages containing scantily clad women exceed the number of fat loss pages, scams and ad laden sites out there.

It blows my mind what people will believe. What fads or “flushes” they’ll try. It’s like being the only sane one in the planet. Right? I’m not trying to insult people, sure the (insert single food here) diet will cause you to lose weight, but that’s because you’re usually starving yourself.

Your body is a machine.

This became clear to me a few weeks ago. My girlfriend and I are homebodies and we’ve got a few plants on our front porch. As plants tend to do, they were wilting one day when I came home from work. I went in, got a pitcher of water, gave it to the plants and went back inside. Not a few hours later my girlfriend and I left to meet some friends and I noticed a marked improvement in the plants. Why?

They’re a machine.

I’ve never been a big science geek. I love explosions. I understand the basics. But I fudged my way through the classes on ego, confidence, and cramming knowledge that was gone as soon as I finished the test. So the realization that the water caused a reaction in the plants so quickly made me realize just what happens inside the human body.

It’s all a process, a reaction to a stimulus.

When I eat the cheeseburger, the body is forced to mine for gold and store the remnants it can’t work with at the time. Sure if I end up in the Mojave desert it can begin processing the fat, but when it has the nuggets of goodness available it isn’t going to process the stuff it has to do more with.

When I eat an apple though, it’s 100% good stuff. Sugars, fiber, a little protein, all key pieces that the system can process and very little ends up stored in case of emergency.

Your body is always preparing for the apocalypse, when food is scarce and you’ll need stores to call upon. It doesn’t know that there are literally dozens of places to acquire food within walking distance, there’s no way for it to know that. Evolutionarily speaking, this is how it is built. To prepare for the worst. That’s what worked in the past.

But then when Sammy realizes his high school reunion is two weeks away and he is a lard ass, he decides to drop 20 pounds by not eating, what is he doing? He’s causing his body, the system that it is, to turn on itself and begin processing any fuel it can find. What’s the most readily available fuel? Muscle.

Your body always chooses the fuel which requires the least energy to process, that is the fuel which is most beneficial. It’s a sound economic choice. If you could either dig for gold in mines, or just pick it up off of your front lawn, which would you do? So by starving yourself you’re forcing your body to find fuel internally, and the first option is your muscle. So you can lose weight by fasting, but it’s extremely unhealthy, not just because it comes off your biceps or abs, but because it can also come off your heart.

Your heart is an extremely lean muscle and if your body needs the fuel, it will even take from the main reactor itself. An obviously bad thing.

In truth, the modern media is who created the health craze. The idea that people need to be super skinny is a product of the media companies. For centuries having fat on your body was a desirable trait. In the middle ages it showed that you could afford to eat excess. Even James Dean had a bit of a pot belly and that’s less than thirty years ago.

However, there is a very real concern about heart disease, diabetes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, etc. These are things that we can avoid, and it is for these that I work out. Well, those and the dream of one day being on American Gladiators.

When I realized that there was no voodoo, there was no magic, there was just science and chemical reactions, I had the epiphany. This was just the first of several realizations for me, and things which have led to return with a vengeance to a life seeking to be healthier.

Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food” lays out a handful of his basic tenets from the book in a video of his talk at Google. It’s a fascinating talk and it discusses a lot of very interesting concepts, a few of which I’ll be exploring in the future. In the mean time, watch the video, we’ll discuss later: Michael Pollan Authors@Google

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